When the vampires roamed freely

What if Gutenberg, Caxton or other pioneers of book printing and publishing 450 years ago had decided that after a couple of decades of use, the books would self combust leaving the reader with nothing but ashes? Because this is what Amazon in all its wisdom did last week when announcing that in six weeks’ time its first generations of Kindles would be bricked and would henceforth become a landfill problem. Newer, post 2012, versions will be okay (for now) but older hardware, Amazon says, is outdated and here is a token 20% discount on a new version. 

People would still have the books they have purchased and even if there are no issues with the Kindle they have, they will not be able to access them. Fortunately this cannot happen with print on paper and people are still able to read what Gutenberg and Caxton have printed centuries after committing ink to paper. An exhibition about Caxton is currently running at Senate House at the University of London to demonstrate this. It is still possible to read first editions of Shakespeare to see annotations and corrections to the script that add insight to the printed text.

None of that is possible with the shiny, slick world where digital formats reign. Something committed to a Kindle (other ereaders were available) remains as it was without the possibility of the marginalia that adds something to the unprinted word. The digital reader is the vampire of the publishing world: it sucks the life out of a printed book. There is no heft, no tactile experience, just an empty husk of a publication where only the words remain. When ereaders first arrived, the promise was that the digital experience would be superior, more interactive than print. That proved to be baloney and now Amazon has driven a stake through the heart of its own Dracula device.